No, I Don't Want To Click For More Pages
from the keep-it-simple dept
Over at The Inquirer, they've picked up on a pet peeve found on many news websites that is becoming way too common: splitting a news story up into multiple pages with just a tiny bit of content on each page (but, tons of ads). There's absolutely no reason to do this other than to try to artificially boost your ad inventory. It's a nuisance to users, and guarantees that plenty won't actually finish reading the story they started. A very few sites (the NY Times comes to mind) does offer a "single page view," but most don't. On many sites you can fake it with the "print story" link, but not all have that, and some make it very difficult to link to the print story site. Obviously, trying to increase ad impressions makes sense, but the way to do it is with good content, not by pissing off your readers. Pissing off your readers can lead to the opposite result. In fact, there are times when we'll go searching for other versions of a story that don't make us jump through hoops -- so, splitting up stories to get more impressions can sometimes mean that sites like ours will drive less traffic to your stories.
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another reason?
I figured they might be doing it to see which articles are being read in full and which are just being started to be read and then not read in full. i.e. which articles readers find interesting enough to read in full.
This could be valuable information to the papers editors.
Or maybe it is just for more ad revenue. perhaps both?
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I totally agree
I block almost all ads, but having to (find and then) click the "next" button 7 times to read an article about a hard drive is ludicrous!
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old news
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Dinosaurs In The City Room
Newspapers are insuring their own demise, and I won't get into the politics of it. But, it seems that many of the people working in print these days are not the top of the class. Misspelled words, factual errors - name it and they've done it. Web pages are just too technical for that mindset to grasp.
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Who cares
Thousands of news sites report the same story. Users will simply flock to the sites that are the least cumbersome to deal with, those sites with the most ads eventually dying off.
Pick a site you like and stick with it. If it starts to irritate you, then move on to another, there's plenty out there to choose from.
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Re: I totally agree
Some places ads are wrong and annoying, but just in a regular news story should be fine... as for the splitting up the ads on 5 pages, the advertisers should be the angry ones because they are devaluing the ads and making them more annoying to users. I would rather place my ads on one good page instead of 5 crappy tiny ones.
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Re: another reason?
I really dont mind splitting articles if they are long, but splitting short articles is stupid. The Weblogs, Inc., crew (Engadget, Joystiq, et al...) does this all the time. The entire blog entry will be 2 paragraphs, the second para hidden behind the permalink, and its 2 sentences long. ABCNews.com and WeeklyStandard.com split articles, but at a certain length, not in the middle. This results in 90% of the article on page 1 and 3 sentences on page 2.
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Sites that require registration should "reward" those who sign up with the ability to default to a single-page view of articles.
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Robert Cringley has a good analysis of why this sh
After reading his column, I dont think I mind the idea as long as there are things such as adblock and I control the access to the data (in other words I use my browser with my plugins, not some downloaded abomination). It is certainly something that has to be there for the business model to work, and the alternative is not people doing things on the web for free, but rather nothing at all.
Just as long as a way to manage the ad stream or block it exists that I control, i do not mind it. The real problem one should complain about is the now universal practice of smearing the bottom 10 to 20 % of the tv on cable with ads for stupid upcoming programs, and products, and the blatant and stupid product placements in movies. That is really much worse than a page full of paper ads in a newspaper you can read around, or a web site with ads you can use adblock on.
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